


Sidebar

by Anonymous



Category: Hannibal (TV), Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Changing Tenses, College, F/F, First Time, POV Female Character, POV First Person, Pre-Canon, hints of Christine Everhart/Pepper Potts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-25
Updated: 2014-10-25
Packaged: 2018-12-19 16:59:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11902140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Freddie Lounds and Christine Everhart used to be an item while they were attending the same journalism school.





	Sidebar

**Author's Note:**

> Quickfic written on tumblr three years ago, hence the backdating.
> 
> No beta; errors pointed out kindly will be corrected with alacrity.

Freddie Lounds dropped out of school a semester before she'd been due to graduate.  By then, she’d already been on academic probation twice, and we’d lost touch when she fell so far behind in classes that I had leapfrogged ahead of her in the program.  She'd started a year ahead of me.

I wonder what she’s doing sometimes, like when I’m halfway around the world on an airplane with no wifi or I'm taking a two-minute meal break six hours before a deadline.  When I think of her, I lose track of what I’m doing, remembering the taste of cheap wine and cheaper pot and the crunch of her curly hair under my palms.  I remember college-ruled notebooks filled with her outsized scrawl.

“I’m going to  _own_  this shit,” she'd said once, gesturing expansively.  "Just watch.“  I believed her.  She'd always been good.  She could make puzzle pieces fit together in three dimensions, thought diagonally and in spirals where I had to work my ass off just to back up a straightforward story.  She could see the whole ecosystem of big money networks, and they  _bored_  her.  She liked people best, the more twisted the better.

I never figured out why she'd liked  _me_.  Maybe it was because we could both spin people; she's good at dissecting them, figuring out how they tick, but I've always been good at getting them to spill their guts without realizing they've been played.

My phone chimes, I snap back to reality, and I forget about Freddie again, caught up in my life.

 

* * *

 

I remember sorority parties in one big blur, all of them the same, except when they weren't.  I don’t know why I went that night; my course load had been ramping up, but I probably told myself that I was there for friends, for connections, for networking, even as I edged away from the cluster of sophomore guys who'd been encouraging each other to get girls drunk on the flat keg beer.

I slipped outside to the porch that wrapped around the back, and spotted a silhouette at the corner, perched on the railing.

"Hey,” I said, recognizing her from Ethics and Problems in Telecommunication.  "I didn’t think you were in this sorority.“

"I’m not,” she said, and her smile was a sly sliver, like a hook that snagged me and pulled me further into the shadows.  "I just know a guy.“

"Which guy?”

“My hookup,” she said, and I saw the bright flare of the joint she’d been hiding and caught the thick pungent smell of it before the breeze whisked it away again.  "Want some?“

I glanced around, but there’d been a tree and a cluster of bushes between us and the road.  "Yeah, okay.”

 

* * *

 

Her hair was always perfect, a riot of curls that looked as good after she got out of bed as they had before she fell asleep.  "I can’t help it,“ she said when I mentioned it, but I knew she was lying.  The sink in her shitty fourth-story studio was crammed with bottles of product.

She put lip gloss on, a saturated and unseasonal berry red, just to see it smeared across my pale inner thighs, and she laughed when I complained that it was going to stain my sheets.

 

* * *

 

"Who the fuck keeps  _writing_  you all the time?” I asked when I saw the pile of envelopes - not just junk mail, but an assortment of hand-addressed envelopes with weird stamps all over them - spilling out of her mailbox.

There was that smile again, and her eyes glinted with satisfaction.  "My pen pals,“ she said.  I helped her carry them, and got a look at the stamps.

"Shit, these are from  _prisons_.”

“Yep,” she said, popping the ‘p’ at the end of the word.

I stopped in the middle of the stairwell and gaped up at her.  

“Come on, Chrissie, do you want me to proof your report or not?”

 

* * *

 

She kissed me first, but it could be argued that I made the first move. I wanted to know if that impossible cheekbone would fit in my palm as well as I thought it might.

I hadn’t known her wicked smile would feel  _soft_  as she shaped her mouth to mine, but it did.

 

* * *

 

After I got my master’s, I heard that Freddie graduated from a different school than the one I'd met her at. One of my fellow VF interns complained about her after orientation.  "So this ginger bitch,“ he said, "Gets a job at her father’s paper handed to her, right?  And what does she do?  She turns it down to run some  _blog_  about serial killers.  Whatever, it opened up a spot for me and I needed the money, even if it was a local rag.”

I got him fired a week and a half later for harassment; the girl I rescued from his tacky come-ons ended up my new roommate.  She and I got along just fine until I landed the single paying gig at the end of our contract, and she had to work as a waitress while she hunted for a new writing job.  It went downhill after that.

 

* * *

 

I look up Freddie’s website one night, when I’m at a dead end and it’s too late to call my sources; I'm finally thinking of her while I’ve got both a reliable internet connection and some time to kill.

When it loads, I laugh out loud.  It’s exactly what I should have expected, intuitive design but deliberately oversized serif-font headlines in a deep rich red.  It’s very, very…  _Freddie_.

I get sucked into the stories, clever hotlinking making tabs bloom in my browser window like weeds in a time-lapse video.  I can almost hear her voice whispering in my ear, the way she used to read to me from her notebooks, cheap black-and-white marbled composition books from the dollar store even though she had a laptop gathering dust on her desk.

I remember shivering in her arms while she'd tell me horror stories with meticulous citation.

 

* * *

 

I read until dawn, forgetting about my next deadline.  I’m sick of writing about Tony Stark anyway.  Maybe I should write about that assistant of his.  

I always did prefer redheads.

 

 

 

 

\- end -


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